HOETICULTURAL JOURNAL. 57 
abundance of room for the insertion of the bud. GKiis is "well illustrated in 
Fig. 2, and when the angles a a are very acute, the wings will stand out so 
far that the bud may almost be dropped in place. It takes a little more 
time to make two oblique cuts than one cross-cut, but it saA^es time in the 
end, if the bark of the stock is very thick or the buds are very tender. I 
have tried this mode satisfactorily, and am inclined to think that the buds 
take better than in the T mode. This may be due to the extended line for 
the descending sap surrounding the shield of the bud, and facilitating its 
union with the stock. 
Washington, D. C, January 24, 1855. 
STUDIES ON THE ORCHIDS. 
The amateurs, who date for a little more than twenty years, have seen 
appear in Belgium the first collection of tropical Orchids, and we doubt 
whether any of them can forget the deep impression made by the first speci- 
mens alive and flourishing of this fantastic tribe. It was not only the 
unaccustomed form, the singular appearance of these plants, the elegant 
grotesquesness of their infloresC'ence, so delicate, fine, aerial, so singular 
and monstrous in aspect, imitating completely the flight of insects, of butter- 
flies, of birds of another world, which, perhaps, they seemed to recognize ; 
their size and the brilliancy of their colors, so strong and so delicate ; it was 
not only those new perfumes, whose sweet strength seemed to have in it 
something wild and primitive ; besides all these floral splendors, which are 
rarely afi"orded to the admirer, there was for the studious amateur, an 
interest and an attraction not less powerful in the out of the way nature and 
the entirely unexpected kind of life of these aerial plants, created to live 
without touching the earth, suspended on the trunks and branches of trees, 
under the dense shade of virgin forests, cradled and nourished at the same 
time by the warm and moist winds of the torrid zone. 
Nothing in our northern climates gives an idea of this airy vegetation, 
and our hot-houses with their dry air, burning with the sun, cannot but be 
mortal to them. The introduction of tropical Orchids overtm-ned the re- 
ceived ideas in horticulture and disconcerted all routine ; it also raised that 
deaf and blind opposition which attaches itself to everything which is new, 
and which staggers inertia and exposes ignorance. It was a horticultural 
revolution which prepared and which should not stop short of the reform of 
